Video: Allen Ginsberg’s Tugboat Ride

This week in the magazine, Burkhard Bilger writes about a family of tugboat pilots. Its patriarch is Latham Smith, who dropped out of Yale and went on to build his first tugboat, the Elsbeth, in 1969. Among his first passengers were a couple of Beat poets:> In a Super 8 film of the sea trial, Allen Ginsberg is along for the ride, the wind tossing his already tousled hair. He and his partner, Peter Orlovsky, had become fascinated by the tug—Orlovsky had even written a poem about it—and Latham, for all his suspicions of Eastern intellectuals, had taken to Ginsberg as well. “What I was doing was strange to the maritime community,” he told me. “But Allen had worked in the Brooklyn shipyard, and he would come and ask me questions in a very thoughtful and gentle way, to get me to verbalize what was maybe visual but not verbal. To me, it was like I’d had a vision, and Allen wanted to penetrate that veil.”

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